Abstract
We present in this article a new approach to the synthesis problem for finite state machines with the reduction of power dissipation as a design objective. A finite state machine is decomposed into a number of coupled submachines. Most of the time, only one of the submachines will be activated which, consequently, could lead to substantial savings in power consumption. The key steps in our approach are: (1) decomposition of a finite state machine into submachines so that there is a high probability that state transitions will be confined to the smaller of the submachines most of the time, and (2) synthesis of the coupled submachines to optimize the logic circuits. Experimental results confirmed that our approach produced very good results (in particular, for finite state machines with a large number of states). © 1996 ACM.